Brayton Fire Training Field and Disaster City

In the city of College Station in Texas (part-way between Dallas and Houston) there is a scene of apparent disaster, with many burnt-out industrial facilities, collapsed buildings and train cars strewn asunder. However, they are all just simulations found in a pair of the world’s biggest facilities for fire and disaster training – Brayton Fire Training Field and Disaster City.

Operated by the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX – a part of Texas A&M University), these facilities host tens of thousands of emergency responders every year for cutting-edge training programs. At Brayton Fire Training Field there are eleven large-scale training setups which house a total of over 130 different props for different scenarios.

Unfortunately the satellite view doesn’t capture anything actually on fire, though the grainy first-generation Street View images do show a training session in action – we can see a column of smoke rising from one of props, with water or foam being sprayed on it.

In addition to the outdoor props, Brayton has several buildings for training against fires located in indoor and confined space scenarios.

To the south-east of the fire training field, Disaster City has multiple customisable scenarios in each of five different aspects of emergency-response training.

In this area we can see three different partially-collapsed buildings – industrial, strip mall and multipurpose. Each can be easily modified to portray natural or man-made disasters such as bombs, earthquakes and hurricanes. There are also two large rubble piles for training in search-and-rescue techniques in structures that have fully collapsed.

It’s unfortunate that the street view car wasn’t able to drive around this facility. I’m also disappointed that the main street is called Stillwater Road – “Disaster Drive” or “Calamity Crescent” would have been more appropriate!

This section has two more partial-collapses – a house and an office building – and a third rubble pile. In addition there is a passenger train, three cars of which have ‘derailed’ – note the red car near the locomotive which apparently caused the accident!

Thanks Brian – it’s always great when we get comments on a post from somebody directly involved with the location. Are there any key parts of the facility that I missed? I was able to find a partially labelled diagram of the various props, but wasn’t sure about all of them.

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